Opinion Brief: Monday, August 8, 2016

Tonight’s Opinion Brief is brought to you by New Canadian Media – a not-for-profit online media organization that presents news and comment from an immigrant perspective for all Canadians.

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Good evening, subscribers. In politics, success — according to the late Ralph Klein — amounts to figuring out where the parade is going and then getting in front of it. Which is pretty good advice — assuming you want to go where the parade is going.

Case in point: This past weekend, Green party members ignored their own leader — the perpetually popular Elizabeth May — and embraced the controversial Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement that seeks to isolate Israel economically. Tasha Kheiriddin agrees with May’s assessment — that BDS is polarizing, ineffective and unhelpful — and suggests that this self-inflicted wound might be May’s cue to quit. “Will the BDS decision become a tipping point for the Greens, by giving May an obvious reason to step aside? Or is it just the tip of the iceberg — another strike against a party that still struggles to break above 6.8 per cent in the popular vote?”

Best-selling Catholic author Carl Anderson and the Most Rev. Bashar Warda, Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Erbil, Iraq, have penned a piece calling on the West to recognize that ISIS is pursuing a policy of genocide against all Christian populations under its control — not just the Yazidis. “Iraq’s Christian population has plummeted by nearly 90 per cent, Syria’s by almost 70 per cent. In the land where it first took root, Christianity could be stamped out entirely — within our lifetime.”

Finally, here’s The Tyee‘s David Beers sharing his personal memories of Mel Hurtig, the fierce Canadian nationalist and media rebel who passed away recently at age 84. “One newspaper journalist said she found his economic nationalism ‘quaint’. My feeling is that Mel Hurtig’s views are proving to be the opposite of quaint; rather, they are increasingly being vindicated as prophetic.”